Israel accepts Jenin probe

Israel has said it will cooperate with a UN mission to probe its crushing assault on the Jenin refugee camp and said it had nothing to hide in the face of Palestinian accusations of a massacre.

Palestinians said they hoped the UN Security Council's unanimous decision on Friday to send a "fact-finding" team to the camp could lead to an international criminal trial of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other senior figures.

"We have nothing to hide and we will gladly cooperate with this UN inquiry," Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon, said after the United States proposed the compromise UN resolution.

Watching camp refugees dig in rain-soaked rubble for bodies and possessions, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for the region, William Burns, called Jenin a "terrible human tragedy".

There was no end to the standoff between Israel and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat following the failed peace mission last week by US Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Israel rejected an offer from Arafat to try the suspected killers of an Israeli cabinet minister in a Palestinian court.

The Palestinian leader had made the suggestion as he seeks a way to end Israel's three-week-old siege of his Ramallah compound.

At Jenin camp, Burns told Reuters: "It's obvious that what happened here in the Jenin camp has caused enormous human suffering for thousands of Palestinian civilians."

But he declined to comment on whether he saw evidence of a massacre Palestinians allege was committed by the Israeli army.

Burns called on Israel to provide "full and complete access to relief agencies" to let them bring in equipment and supplies.

An Israeli army spokesman said all its forces had withdrawn from the camp apart from some soldiers now extracting bodies for burial by families.

Staff of the International Committee of the Red Cross were observing their activities.

"It took six days for the Israeli army to let us into the camp but now we have fairly free access on a daily basis," said Jessica Barry, an ICRC spokeswoman.

At the United Nations in New York late on Friday, delegates voted unanimously to send a "fact-finding team" to Jenin, backing a US-drafted resolution after Washington threatened to veto a measure put forward by Arab states that had called for a formal UN "investigation" of "massacres" in the camp.

Israel denies any massacre and says its troops sought to minimise casualties in what was a "hornets' nest of terrorists".

The stench of rotting bodies still wafts from debris in the flattened heart of the camp, the scene of the fiercest fighting in Israel's West Bank offensive, unleashed on March 29 after suicide bombings killed scores of Israelis.

"This is the first step towards making Sharon stand trial before an international tribunal," Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said after the U.N. vote.

He also demanded trials for Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli army's chief-of-staff.

It remains, however, highly improbable that the United States and Israel's other Western allies would support any move to make Israeli leaders face an international trial.

The army said on Friday its forces had left Jenin city and the neighbouring camp but were still deployed around them.

A Jenin hospital official said the body count in the refugee camp had risen to 39 but added that it could climb to between 200 and 400. Israel says about 70 Palestinians died, mostly fighters. Twenty-three Israeli troops were killed in Jenin.

"We have found 38 bodies so far - 11 in the first days of the fighting. The assessment is that there are a few dozen more bodies under the rubble," an army spokesman said on Saturday.

Israel has said the army will also quit the city of Nablus by Sunday but stay at Arafat's compound and near the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem until standoffs with militants end.

"There's no progress so far," Bethlehem's mayor, Hanna Nasser, told Reuters on Saturday. "The Israelis have not been touch with us today. But there are high-level discussions at the leadership level involving the Europeans, the United States, the Vatican and the Palestinians and Israelis."

Israel demands the surrender of militants among more than 200 people, including gunmen and foreign clergy, holed up inside one of Christianity's holiest sites since April 2.

Sharon has said he will keep tanks around Arafat's battered headquarters until suspects wanted for the October assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi are handed over to Israel.

Arafat's offer to have a Palestinian court try Zeevi's suspected killers, relayed by his adviser Mohammed Rashid, was the first acknowledgement they were in his compound and appeared to be an attempt by Arafat to break out of his confinement.

"The Palestinian side accepts and welcomes the call by US President George W. Bush to submit those accused of killing Zeevi to...Palestinian justice," Rashid said.

Bush said on Thursday that Zeevi's suspected assassins should be brought to justice but did not say where.

Gissin demanded the suspects be extradited to Israel.

At least 1,287 Palestinians and 452 Israelis have died since a Palestinian revolt against occupation erupted 18 months ago.